A milestone for Wisconsin’s youth correction facility, as a U.S. District judge this week ended mandated oversight at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake, put in place in 2018 because of how youth were being treated. Tim Muth is Wisconsin Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU, which filed an initial lawsuit in 2017.

“Guards were regularly using pepper spray on the children there as young as 13 and 14,” Muth explained. “They were locking boys in solitary confinement for weeks or months at a time as a form of discipline. They were regularly engaging in strip searches.”

Muth said Judge James Peterson called the conditions “worse than the conditions that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was experiencing in federal maximum security prison.”

While pleased that conditions have improved, Muth says the state still has a long way to go to honor a commitment to complete new facilities in Milwaukee and Dane Counties to house young offenders. “Four years later, It still looks like we are years out. So we need the legislature to renew its commitment along with the governor to get these smaller residential facilities built.”

Judge Peterson signed an order on Wednesday that terminates a consent decree requiring certain rules for managing youth inmates at Copper Lake and Lincoln Hills.